Editorial: Give taxpayers more control over pensions they fund

Monday

Aug 31, 2009 at 12:01 AMAug 31, 2009 at 11:41 AM

Any legislative actions taken on public pension reform should include a measure ensuring the makeup of the local boards is changed to give the public – not the retirees – more of a role in setting policy and making decisions.

“Is it political? Absolutely not,” says Ralph White.

The subject is the retirement system for public employees in local cities and towns.

White is president of the Retired State, County and Municipal Employees Association of Massachusetts. He sees nothing out of whack with the fact that 84 percent of people who run the seven municipal and two county retirement boards on the South Shore are people who have or will benefit from the decisions of those boards.

White says the best people to make decisions about how the retirement system operates are those who are or will get benefits from that system.

“We encourage retirees to take part in board elections,” he said in a recent interview with The Patriot Ledger.

There are separate retirement boards in Norfolk and Plymouth counties, and in Quincy, Braintree, Weymouth, Milton, Hingham, Hull and Plymouth. Each board has five members. They make decisions about tens of millions of dollars a year in retirement, disability and survivor benefits.

One member of each board is the town accountant or someone in a similar position in town or city government. That person gets to appoint one other person to the pension board, as do the selectmen or mayor. The other two members are elected by the retirees themselves.

The problem, as we see it, is a lack of independent oversight or control. The two people elected by the retirees are nearly always fellow retirees – people who worked for the city, town or county. The town accountant or finance officer will be a beneficiary of the system when he or she retires, and the person the accountant appoints is most often someone else in local government. The appointees of selectmen or mayors are more likely to be from the business community – a banker, insurance professional, accountant.

We need far more such independent voices on these boards that across the state are responsible for dispensing hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money. Only eight of the 45 people serving on the local and county boards on the South Shore are those independent voices.

That is also the view of James Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, a watchdog group that keeps its eye on government spending.

“These boards have a lot of power,” he said. “They are very heavily tilted toward those with self-interest, and I think that’s problematic,” Widmer said.

We couldn’t agree more, and now is the time to do something about it.

A special state commission has spent several months looking into every aspect of the state system for funding and paying retirement benefits for public workers. Its report is due next month. Any legislative actions taken on its recommendations should include a measure ensuring the makeup of the local boards is changed to give the public – not the retirees – more of a role in setting policy and making decisions.

The Patriot Ledger

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